Hi all,

I am trying to get X-Forwarding working between my laptop and desktop. It works great when my laptop is on the same LAN with the desktop, but I am unable to get it working accross the WAN when both computers are behind different routers.

On the LAN I do this from the laptop:

laptop>xhost +desktop
laptop>ssh desktop
desktop>program --display=laptop:0.0

This works as expected. When I try this accross the WAN, substituting the external IPs for the internal ones, I get "Couldn't connect to X-server". I have also tried ssh'ing with the -X switch and get the same problem. When I manually set the DISPLAY variable to my laptop's router's IP I get no error message, but neither does the program launch on my laptop.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Brian

I could be wrong here, but I think when you use the method --display=laptop:0.0, it will not send the data over ssh, but over a high number port (for some reason I'm thinking it's in the 6000s somewhere), and is not encrypted.

See my post #10 in this thread for a quickie on getting X forwarding over ssh (port 22 by default and encrypted)

Yes you should not set DISPLAY or do xhost or anything like that. Just use "ssh -Y" and it forwards through the SSH connection and so should not be affected by routers, etc.

Thanks for the answers.

It seems that some programs are happy to be x-forwarded and others are not. The program that I primarily use remotely is Bluefish. It gives a BadWindow error and stops with the -X method both accross LAN and WAN (which is why I switched to the --display method). I've tried a couple other programs now (eg. Scribus) and they are happy with the -X method even though they produce a bunch of BadWindow errors as well (and are slow as the dickens over WAN).

Thanks again,
Brian